Tom Hall

Tom Hall is a family lawyer in West Los Angeles. He is from Boston, and was raised in Friends Meeting at Cambridge (Quakers) to think that religion was a progressive force. During the Vietnam War, he organized draft counseling centers and worked with groups training people in techniques for disciplined nonviolent demonstrating. After the war, he became just another yuppie working to make a comfortable life. The Bush administration shocked him back into social concerns. Tom can be reached at ProgBlog@aol.com

Tom Hall: What good will it do to end discrimination against women if we ignore climate change and environmental destruction, and all the elderly widows in Florida find that rising sea levels have put their state underwater?

Tom Hall: Nikki Haley is outraged that Iran is outraged by the U.S. policy of slaughtering thousands of Yemeni civilians, most recently by encouraging the spread of diphtheria and other diseases, while cutting off medical aid.

Tom Hall: Empires fall of their own weight. And the Donald is the weightiest president our empire has had for many years. He has put his considerable weight behind the effort to recognize and confirm the end of the American Imperial Age.

It’s like buying football game tickets to support the players’ right to free expression of their disapproval of police brutality toward and killings of people of color. Can’t be bad. But supporting a gladiator sport whose natural outcome is brain damage for every player can’t be good.

Tom Hall: What struck me most about the language being used was how familiar it was. The student presenters sounded a lot like a lot of the organizers I worked with, first on Civil Rights and then on anti-Vietnam War activities, back in the ‘60s.

Tom Hall: Except that the worst of the worst of today’s “irresponsible” men are all BABY BOOMERS! OUR generation – the generation that gave the Civil Rights Movement its greatest push forward, then turned our backs on Civil Rights to build the anti-Vietnam War Movement.

Tom Hall: The murder of non-whites by police – officers of the state – horrifies and distracts people. But there are less dramatic crimes, every day, that shape the lives of black people, and people of other colors.

Tom Hall: 230 years ago, a group of very disparate men, yes men, no women allowed, argued, debated, balanced interests, and then agreed on a plan to start a new nation, unlike any other that had existed in history.

The Middle East

David A. Love: Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs works with front groups such as the Israel Project and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) to spy on US citizens who support Palestinian rights and smear them as anti-Semites, in a covert campaign that smacks of McCarthyism and Islamophobia.